About Grief

By: Stephen Levine

Posted: September 20, 2013

When our heart is broken searching for a meaning and purpose leaves us wandering and bewildered.
As life changes meaning changes. What was ordinary becomes precious. What was interesting seems dull.

Nothing at last reveals the reason we seem so often to be suffering.
It is so painful to open that fist cramped closed about the heart. We peel back the grasping one finger at a time. Slowly our natural mind returns.

At first there is a great tearing away and the long breaking-through of every certainty. All explanations and prayers seem fruitless. It doesn’t even make sense to make sense anymore.

In time measured seemingly in eons rather than months or years the heart begins somehow to mend as it remembers all the love that yet remains. The mind reappears as if from behind an eclipse. Limitations fall away one at a time. We find ourselves lost and found in an unpredictably terrible/beautiful world. There is no choice and no control, the clamorings of the heart are torn open to healing.

Beyond what is normally accessible to ordinary awareness we find a nearly overwhelming mercy and generosity, an enormity in which everything, even our suffering, seems to be unfolding “in almost a sacred manner”.

We rise between realms, no longer losing our bearings in what once may have seemed the dark night of the soul, guided by the beating of the heart as it sounds the depths of the infinite.

The light of awareness enters niches and crevices long since abandoned to shadow. We find ourselves once again at the entrance to the world and once again bow to life.